Back in high school, when things weren’t looking good we liked to tell a joke: “I was feeling depressed; nothing was going right, Then I heard a voice say to me: ‘Cheer up! Things could be worse.’ So, I cheered up, and, sure enough, things got worse.”
So here we are, with less than three weeks to go for the second coming of Donald Trump. The President-elect has announced his cabinet, including: Sen. Marco (Little Marco) Rubio for secretary of State; Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense; first Matt Gaetz and then Pam Bondi for Attorney General; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for secretary of Health and Human Services; Tulsi Gabbard for director of Intelligence; Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota for secretary of Homeland Security; John Ratcliffe for director of Central Intelligence, Kash Patel for director of the FBI and some others. Matt Gaetz dropped by the wayside, but his withdrawal doesn’t alter the point.
Originally, this installment of our ongoing reflection on the state of our union was going to be a satire on the announced appointments to the new administration. It isn’t possible to satirize them, however. They do that themselves.
Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense? His only qualification, and it isn’t much, is that he’s a major in the Minnesota National Guard and he served some time in Iraq and Afghanistan. The few times he’s managed anything–and it was small non-profit organizations–it reportedly didn’t turn out well. It’s fair to say that the Department of Defense needs a competent manager to oversee four branches of the armed forces, a budget of billions and hundreds of thousands of employees, military and civilian.
Tulsi Gabbard, a former four-term member of Congress, with no experience whatsoever in intelligence, to be director of national intelligence. Gabbard is an apparent admirer of Vladimir Putin, which may, in Donald Trump’s eyes be a qualification, but the rest of us should be more than a little skeptical–and worried.
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, former four term member of the House, but no experience in national security to be secretary of Homeland Security? She reportedly has a “close” relationship with Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski.
It’s a tossup which of the next two nominees is more ludicrous. We have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine advocate, purveyor of false information and conspiracy theorist, to be secretary of Health and Human Services, a position for which he not only has no qualifications but also seems intent on taking a sledgehammer to the various components of the agency he would head.
Kash Patel, a lawyer and profound Trump loyalist, worked in the Justice Department before leaving it to work on Capitol Hill and write a report critical of the FBI-Justice Department investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has no law enforcement experience. In fact, he sounds like he wants to disband the FBI. His first loyalty will be not to the Constitution or the FBI but to Trump. When Trump floated the idea of appointing Patel to be deputy FBI director during Trump’s first term, the then Attorney General, William Barr, reportedly said, “Over my dead body.”
Matt Gaetz may be gone, but he’s not forgotten. Gaetz illustrated two points: One, qualifications didn’t matter. Under normal circumstances his nomination would have seemed ridiculous even without all the brouhaha over his sexual misadventures, etc. He had no qualifications for the job other than being a lawyer. That leads us to, Point Two: Gaetz would have been loyal to Trump, and loyalty is the first requirement and the only real qualification for any of these appointments.
Trump, of course, has an agenda, and it has nothing to do with policy or the betterment of America. It has everything to do with settling scores.
Any number of public officials, private persons, former government officials, pundits, newspaper editorial writers and others have expressed concern about the government taking shape. William Webster, the only person to serve as director of the FBI and the CIA wrote to senators last month opposing both Patel and Gabbard. “His record of executing the president’s directives suggest a loyalty to individuals rather than the rule of law — a dangerous precedent for an agency tasked with impartial enforcement of justice,” Webster wrote regarding Patel. As for Gabbard, Webber said she had a “profound lack” of intelligence experience. “Effective management of our intelligence community requires unparalleled expertise to navigate the complexities of global threats and to maintain the trust of allied nations,” Webster said. “Without that trust, our ability to safeguard sensitive secrets and collaborate internationally is severely diminished.”
That brings up another, related topic. Will Senate Republicans, who have so far distinguished themselves for pusillanimity, at long last do their jobs as required by the Constitution and prevent these neophytes from taking office? The Republican Senate leadership apparently has rejected Trump’s demand that the Senate recess so that he can, as the Constitution allows, make recess appointments without Senate approval. But if the Senate accedes to his nominees despite serious, well-founded concerns, that refusal won’t make any difference.
We have to wonder how we reached a point where our country–and the world for that matter–faces an existential crisis, and so little of our political discussion concerns that threat. A generation ago a presidential candidate was driven from the race because of suggestions that he had committed adultery. Now, we have elected a proven and, for all intents and purposes, an admitted adulterer, who is also a convicted felon and profoundly flawed man to be President–not once, but twice.
The question isn’t so much about him, though, than it is about us. America has never been as good as we like to claim, but we still had the aspiration to create “a more perfect union.” We had our moments of brutality, injustice, genocide and racially motivated murder, but we also acknowledged our sins and atoned for them. We can be and have been enormously generous and not simply out of enlightened self-interest. Yet at least one reading of the last election is that we’ve given up our noble intentions and just want to be left alone.
America faces a labor shortage. In many if not most cases immigrants aren’t taking jobs from Americans; rather they’re taking work that Americans won’t do. We also are failing to reproduce at a replacement rate. Without immigration, our population will shrink, with all kinds of serious consequences. On top of that, we educate hundreds of thousands of foreign students every year, but won’t let them stay here after graduation–a form of unnecessary technology transfer we can’t afford.
Our national debt now exceeds the annual value of goods and services we produce, and it’s growing. We are dependent on foreigners’ financing our deficits, effectively mortgaging–not our futures–but the futures of our children and grandchildren and perhaps generations beyond. One quarter—28 percent of our national debt–was incurred between 2017 and 2021, and the President who negotiated a tax cut in 2017 (primarily for the wealthy) is proposing to do it again.
Rather than discussing the cause of drought-driven fires that occur with increasing frequency along with record floods elsewhere, our public dialogue is dominated by controversies over the use of bathrooms and whether immigrants are eating our pets.
Needless to say, our political discourse didn’t always rise to the moment, but really—bathrooms? Pets?
We have just suffered the loss of Jimmy Carter, former President and annoying patriot, who tried without a great deal of success to lay before the American public real, as opposed to petty, issues.
And now here we are. Are we going to take back the Panama Canal, buy Greenland, cut taxes and further grow our national debt, while we debate whether young men and women who choose to change their gender should be allowed to do so? We are facing enormous, serious problems, from climate change to artificial intelligence, from restraining Russia to managing competition with China, not to mention avoiding nuclear war, which is always an issue. It would be difficult to manage our future with the smartest, most talented group of officeholders. So what can we expect from the crew getting ready to take over?